2 entries tagged productivity. All writing.
SEPTEMBER 10, 2026 He Drew It at 120 Degrees. They Built It at 90. Robert Propst designed the cubicle to give office workers a screen they controlled. He lived to watch companies turn it into a box, and called the result "monolithic insanity." The strange part is that nothing was added to his design to ruin it — the panels were only turned, from an open 120-degree screen into a closed 90-degree cell. Six decades later the walls are gone again, the desk is unassigned, and attendance is mandatory. The thing being spent has been the same the whole time. SEPTEMBER 10, 2026 Six Million Tokens in Eleven Minutes Some friends and I have been arguing about whether it will ever seem normal to spend six million tokens in eleven minutes to make a blog post — and whether a world where the well-off can run AI flat out leaves everyone else with the crumbs. So I priced the tokens, traced where the price is going, and went back to the last time a machine cost more than a house. The number that matters isn't the token count. It's which of two prices you're paying, and who is paying for the free one.